I think that there are a lot of things that have managed to get very very complex in the world of computing and my sense is that it isn't all necessary.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." - Albert Einstein

About Me

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Today I was moving some stuff around my home office and turned off the external drive.

When I finally got things re-organized and re-connected the drive had that old familiar "heads stuck in park position" click happening. It is a 150GB drive, I recalled a moment almost 20 years ago when I unstuck some 104MB drives by spinning them around the axis of rotation.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

If you are reading this in Buzz there is a high likelihood that the title of this blog has a & # 39 in it. Why, because lame-o programmer's have no idea how to process text and make it look right. This Ajax stuff - or whatever is used to do Buzz is yet another example of inadequate testing and just get it out there, however horrible and crappy it happens to be, mentality that is pervasive today.

Monday, March 1, 2010

While looking to see what could be slowing down my computer today I decided to look at the operation event viewer. (Click picture below to see full view)

Hey cool - 15 events in the past 4 seconds - heck that can't be slowing me down at all. Hmmm, let's see - something is slowing me down, perhaps I should try to open up a file and write about it, no wait that will make me even slower, in which case I shall have to open up a file and write about it, and so it goes ad infinitum until the machine screws itself into the ground and requires a power off reboot.

Alas - I shall never again have a machine capable of doing simple tasks simply.....

Sunday, February 21, 2010

As evident by this Wiki post Microsoft's Silverlight which I think is supposed to be competition to Flash is 100% buzzword compliant. The first paragraph of the entry is chock full of buzzwords. Unfortunately the product is about a big a lose as one can imagine.

Right now I am trying to watch some Olympic coverage on NBC's website. It forced this upon me. First the controls - I hate them - now I can't say if this is NBC's doing or Microsoft's, either way - complete junk.

The wiki entry alone shows that this product epitomizes the need for this blog. This is hopelessly and needlessly complex. First, the plug-in didn't even notice that it was a plug-in. I had to download, install and restart my browser step-by-step. Again, don't know if this is NBC or Microsoft.

The view of the screen and "progress" bar gave no indication of buffering. When I tried to back up a bit, it reloaded and paused for a while, then finally showed me something.

If this is meant to be a competitor to youtube or google video - to use one word - FAIL!

Friday, February 19, 2010

Today I was ranting about the number of things that Microsoft has messed up in the new version of office.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/flyoutoverview.mspx

I looked around for some pagination problems a friend was having. It was a monumental effort to get it to change to something manageable. The page number problems have abounded since Word 2000. Yes that's a decade people. How incredibly hard can it be to get page numbering right. Oh and by the way bullet numbering is frequently if not more often more frustrating than page numbering. How is it possible that bullets and levels are so darned hard. I worked for a company 25 years ago called Unilogic that made a product called Scribe. This would format all manner of documents and do it mostly correct from what I recall. How can things have gotten so hard to do now. Answer: needless complexity.

Seems they are creating a version of Quicken for Mac (QFM) that will allow you to quickly see where your investments are today with no view of how much you spent to buy them. Looks like Quicken has let the whiz-bang crew create the new version with no thoughts as to functionality, just make it look cool!

I am now downloading GNU-Cash, and will report on its capabilities after a few tests.